Ladies’ stockings, Delineator magazine, August 1903.
[Please overlook the added texture. The stockings did not have a gray checked pattern. The online image, scanned and posted by Google Books, needs “de-gaussing,” but I no longer have a program that will do that. Sorry.]
These are fashionable stockings featured in Butterick’s Delineator magazine in 1903. Delineator was aimed at middle-class (and aspiring) women, so these stockings were not limited to ladies who showed their legs professionally….
They were colored in pink and blue as well as black and white, sometimes with “lace applique” at the calf and upper thigh. Imagine getting a flash of those stockings peeking out from covered-to-the-chin fashions like these:
Street wear, Delineator magazine, January 1903.
Ladies’ fashions for January 1903. Delineator magazine.
Rambling Thoughts:
The Edwardians had a king known to have multiple liaisons and a long-term mistress, so a glimpse of stocking may have been less shocking in 1903 than in his mother’s reign.
(It’s easy to think of the Victorians as straight-laced, but a “a pair of ladies’ drawers” — the kind worn by Queen Victoria **– were originally “crotchless,” consisting of two legs attached only at the waistband.)
Undergarments for 1893 included frilly “French open drawers” like these:
French Open Drawers, Butterick pattern 6979, Delineator, August 1903.
French Open Drawers. Butterick pattern 7060 in Delineator, September 1893.
“French open drawers” certainly cast a new light on that “disreputable” French dance, the Can-Can. (The Can-Can first appeared in the 1840s, but it remained a popular number for decades.) Ooh-lah-lah!
** A pair of open drawers that belonged to Queen Victoria were sold at auction for over 6,000 pounds in 2014. To read more, go to https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/theroyalfamily/6156020/Queen-Victorias-underwear-part-of-nations-heritage.html
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